Most mornings I walk three or four miles. As I walk I like to listen to podcasts or books on tape (or whatever they are now called). This morning it was episode 257 of the Kunstler Cast, an interview with Piero SanGiorgio, author of Survive the Coming Economic Collapse, a practical guide. Fascinating stuff, especially in light of the different approaches Americans take (lone wolf survival, a la Jeremiah Johnson) vs. European approaches, which do not involve turning your back on society and manning big guns. The great thing about being alive today is the ability we have to go further, track down books we hear about, and even download first chapters on Kindle to read. That’s what I did. And .. even though I will probably not read the book in its entirety, I read enough to be inspired. I love the quotes which open each chapter. Here’s one from Einstein: “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” And also this:

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

― Jules H. Poincare

Yes. Yes .. it works on so many levels, from the unthinking, uncritical fundamentalist, to the whack jobs who populate the far right – the birthers, the truthers, the deniers and the assholes who throw sand in the face of truth, for whatever benighted or greedy reasons. What, I ask you, can you do with people who refuse to believe in climate change, despite overwhelming evidence, but who are more than ready to believe that ISIS is at the Mexican border, spreading Ebola. For the former there is evidence – ample, sound, mainstream evidence. For the latter there is none – just naked, ignorant fear. Imminent “threats” trump long term problems. Cranks and crackpots get listened to, while mainstream expertise is ‘elitist” .. or whatever. Fear does this, fear and denial.

To doubt everything is no different to believing everything – it all amounts to the same lack of thinking. And my oh my, that makes life convenient, doesn’t it?

It’s this thunderous truism: We all know on some level that we are thinking all the time, that we have this voice in our heads, and the nature of this voice is mostly negative. It’s also repetitive and ceaselessly self-referential. We walk around in this fog of memory about the past and anticipation of a future that may or may not arrive in the form in which we imagine it. This observation seemed to describe me. I realized that the things I’d done in my life that I was most ashamed of had been as a result of having thoughts, impulses, urges, and emotions that I didn’t have the wherewithal to resist.

I picked this up from “The Mountain Path”, July 2006, and it’s a breath of fresh air on this cold February morning:

The problem, however, lies in the teaching that it is through thinking and through study of the scriptures (shastras) that we will gain enlightenment. Endless scriptural study is a serious error because it strengthens the habit of thinking. Such study is founded on a fundamental error, different from an error in mathematics, or physics, because it assumes that (a) one has a ‘self’ and is an individual person; and that (b) one needs something external to oneself to help one to get rid of this ‘truly existing’ selfhood. The moment you depend on the thinking mind to guide you, you implicitly assume that your Reality is not here and now, and that to discover our Reality will take time. All this is mental delusion. How can you get at Reality by seeking it in the future, when it is already here right now?

The more you study and the more you reflect on concepts in order to gain enlightenment, the more you indirectly assert that you are not Reality. In thinking like this, you are falsely conditioning your mind, reinforcing your ignorance. Because, as long as the thinking mind is in full swing, Advaita is out of question. To realize Non-Duality through thinking is an impossibility.

Berkeley – “Surely it is a work well deserving our pains to make a strict inquiry concerning the First Principles of Human Knowledge, to sift and examine them on all sides, especially since there may be some grounds to suspect that those lets and difficulties, which stay and embarrass the mind in its search after truth, do not spring from any darkness and intricacy in the objects, or natural defect in the understanding, so much as from false Principles which have been insisted on, and might have been avoided.”

Wittgenstein – “The proper task of philosophy, he says, is to make the nature of our thought and talk clear, for then the traditional problems of philosophy will be recognized as spurious and will accordingly vanish.” (from Wittengenstein, a Very Short Introduction, by A. C. Grayling)

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the “two wolves” which exist inside each person, from an old Cherokee tale. One wolf was your traditional wolfish wolf, full of violence and venom. The other was a nice wolf, which seemed a bit of a stretch at the time, but the story was a good one. But as it turns out, wolves are nothing like as wolvish as we humans like to think.

“The idea that when humans are at their worst when they behave like wolves has been around a long time. Hobbes used the Latin tag homo homini lupus – man is a wolf to man – to illustrate his belief that unless they are restrained by government, people prey upon one another ruthlessly, while descriptions of rapacious or amoral behaviour as wolfish can be found throughout literature.”

“‘The wolf is art of the highest form and you cannot be in its presence without this lifting your spirits.’ Beyond its beauty, though, the wolf taught the philosopher something about the meaning of happiness. Humans tend to think of their lives as progressing towards some kind of eventual fulfilment; when this is not forthcoming they seek satisfaction or distraction in anything that is new or different. This human search for happiness is ‘regressive and futile’, for each valuable moment slips away in the pursuit of others and they are all swallowed up by death. In contrast, living without the sense of time as a line pointing to an end-point, wolves find happiness in the repetition of fulfilling moments, each complete and self-contained. As a result, as Rowlands shows in a moving account of his last year with Brenin, they can flourish in the face of painful illness and encroaching death.”